


in warsaw

by heyfightme



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Anger, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Getting Together, Moving On, Murder, Post-Season/Series 02, but actually it's - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 07:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21194090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyfightme/pseuds/heyfightme
Summary: Sometimes she will see someone on the streets of Warsaw, someone with soft and shiny honey-blonde hair, or someone overdressed and over-chic, and she will just think,It’s about time.She will just think,Yes. There you are.What she feels isn’t fear, and it isn’t any sort of excited thrill. It is just recognition. But then that someone turns, and they don’t have a bright and alert expression. They don’t have strong brows or feline eyes or fine bones, and the feeling is gone, and all that is left is detachment and disinterest.a post-season two interlude, about trying to move on and then coming together.





	in warsaw

**Author's Note:**

> My first foray into writing Killing Eve! I wrote this mostly to try some things out and have a bit of fun with tone and stuff. It's kind of more character study than plot, but hopefully you all enjoy it like I did writing it.

Eve doesn’t read the news. She doesn’t look for murders, and she doesn’t care about random attacks, and she doesn’t search for anything unusual or stylish or cool. She smokes, and she starts biting her nails. She wears her hair up, every single day. There is a scar in her side that she doesn’t look at when she showers. Some nights, she fucks herself hard and fast, and doesn’t smother the sounds that break into the silence of her small, shitty apartment.

She is learning Polish. It comes almost easy, especially being around the cooks at her small, shitty job. She is too old for this. Too old to be washing other peoples’ dishes in the back of this small, shitty restaurant with this small, shitty kitchen. Her life is small. Her life is shitty. And she doesn’t feel unsafe or awake or dangerous any more. She just feels bored.

Sometimes she will see someone on the streets of Warsaw, someone with soft and shiny honey-blonde hair, or someone overdressed and over-chic, and she will just think, _It’s about time_. She will just think, _Yes. There you are._ What she feels isn’t fear, and it isn’t any sort of excited thrill. It is just recognition. But then that someone turns, and they don’t have a bright and alert expression. They don’t have strong brows or feline eyes or fine bones, and the feeling is gone, and all that is left is detachment and disinterest.

Some nights, she fucks herself hard and fast, and as she comes, she hears _I love you_, firm and certain and desperate. Her breath hitches as her body shudders. She always says, “No” into the darkness of the room. It sounds weaker every time.

\---

Villanelle goes shopping. She buys dresses and dainty shoes, outfits that bare her arms and flatter her shape and swish around her legs as she walks around in the sunshine. She carries thick paper bags with ribbon handles, and sips from clear plastic cups full of ice. She doesn’t wear black: she wears flowers and soft colours, floaty fabrics and all things feminine, and she paints her lips shades of dusky pink.

She eats. She eats well, fresh produce and local delicacies. She drinks champagne, and dresses up, and languishes in luxuries like silk bedspreads. She brings women to those bedspreads, older women with fragile collarbones who wear misshapen shirts that hang badly from their shoulders. She doesn’t call them by any name.

She sees Konstantin sometimes. He never stays away for too long, and he is good at hiding and secrets and actual protection. He watches her eat with amused expressions, and he gives her assignments, and hands her wads of cash which she turns into objects that fill the rooms of her new apartment. She keeps the windows open and lets the summer breeze in.

She uses a gun. There isn’t anything clever or special about it. She shoots them in the head, twice to be sure, and doesn’t stage any scenes or talk to them much. They plead with her, _please don’t_ and _I have a family_ and _why why why_, and she just knocks them down and fires the gun. She fires it easily, and it fits into her hand like another hand, warm in her palm and cradled by her fingers.

Villanelle dreams sometimes. She dreams of vast ruins in Rome, empty and with pools of reflective water. A gunshot echoes off the stone, but there aren’t any people and there isn’t any blood. She dreams about an axe sinking into the water. When she wakes up, her pillow is damp and she pretends to herself that she doesn’t know why.

She draws the women she sleeps with, their faces blurry and indistinct but their bodies sharp and sure. She draws their hair, and it isn’t buoyant or voluminous. Her hand moves by itself. She always scrunches up the paper when she is done, and takes it to the trash along with tissue paper which had wrapped precious clothes.

She doesn’t always speak in her normal voice to the women. She tries accents and gives other names. She runs her fingers down their spines, and doesn’t actually let them touch her. She touches herself after they leave, and no images come to her mind as she does it.

\---

The job is in Warsaw, and Villanelle almost doesn’t go to it because it is a hop skip and a jump away from Russia, and it’s all a little too western Europe. The gun is waiting for her in her hotel room, and she isn’t quite sure how Konstantin does it, but she can almost admire the sneakiness.

She only wears trousers when she is killing, now. She tucks the gun into the back of her waistband, metal getting warm against her skin, and pulls her jacket down over it. She ties her hair back in a bun.

She waits outside her mark’s workplace, a midrise that has lights shining in the windows when the sun starts to pull down, corporate types working well past the hours they are being paid for. He leaves with nothing in hand and flags down a cab just outside the door, and she swings her leg over her rented motorbike and follows at a reasonable distance.

His apartment building is squat and new, in a neighbourhood with lots of flash, new restaurants. They are uncharming, but overshadow the small, ingrained places that are clearly hanging on to low rent and years of service. She slips in behind him after he buzzes himself in, and jogs up the stairs as he takes the elevator. She is waiting for him when the doors open, and his brains spray the chrome of the walls. He follows them backwards, stumbling and slumping, and almost seems surprised, like he has a moment of awareness: _oh. I’ve been shot in the head._ His eyes stay open as he drops to the ground, so she can see the moment his mind goes inwards.

She steps in after him, pressing the button for the ground floor, and is glad that there is no dinky music playing. The gun, a bit hot from being fired, goes back into the waistband of her trousers and feels pleasantly raw against her skin. Her hands go into her jacket pockets.

On the street outside, it is raining. She turns her face up to the clouds for a moment, catching droplets on her cheeks, and when she looks back down and across the street, there is a woman standing outside one of the older restaurants, lighting a cigarette behind a cupped hand. She has her hair pulled back, and is wearing a grimy-looking apron and a pair of kitchen clogs. She drops her hands from her face and slips her lighter in the front pocket of the apron, leaning back against the brick wall as she exhales smoke into the rain. She has the cheekbones and the mouth, and a tendril of curled hair is escaping from where she has it pulled taut. She swipes at it with the back of her wrist, almost angrily, and Villanelle is looking at a ghost. She almost yells. Almost.

Eve doesn’t see her, and Villanelle doesn’t really want Eve to see her, because she might not be real or she might disappear or she might run away. Villanelle watches her smoking, watches her tap ash from the end of her cigarette, and thinks she looks quite good for someone who was shot.

“Hello,” she calls across the street, for some reason, because her mouth wants to even though her brain doesn’t.

Eve looks up, and exhales a plume of smoke, and her cigarette drops to the ground.

“Oh, shit,” she says, but doesn’t seem like she’s about to run – until she does, clogs slapping stupidly against the pavement, and she is around a corner and out of sight before Villanelle thinks to follow her.

She has never run so fast. Her boots echo their own sounds, and the rain hits her face sharply, and her knees jar as she rounds the corner and tries to stay on course. She sees Eve almost stumble, shoe flying off and leaving her hopping with her socked foot in the air. She attempts to scoop up her shoe and slip it back on and keep running, but she just ends up accidentally throwing it and skidding to a halt. Villanelle can hear her swearing, and then she is close enough to grab her, to push her by the shoulders and pin her against a dark shop window, one shoe missing and hair coming loose from its tie. Eve pushes back against her, trying to twist from under her hands, but Villanelle just presses her harder against the glass, fisting hands in her shirt and digging knuckles into her bones.

“Stop it! Stop fighting,” she yells, and Eve screeches back, “Help!” so Villanelle leans down and forces their mouths together.

Eve is all teeth, and still screams against Villanelle’s lips, but she does go very still. Villanelle doesn’t move either, just holding their faces against each other. She flattens her hand against Eve’s chest, and swears she can feel her heartbeat, frantic and hard. She waits, long moments, and this is more imprisonment than kiss, but it is working. Eve eventually turns her head, smudging Villanelle’s lips across her cheek, and says, “Let me go.”

“Don’t run.”

“I won’t run.”

“I will chase you again if you run.”

“I won’t run.”

Villanelle does step back, letting her hands trail down Eve’s arms to her wrists where she can feel bare skin, and then she isn’t touching her at all. Eve’s chest is heaving slightly, and her eyes are wide and pinpricked, and her face is wet from the rain.

“How did you find me?”

Villanelle laughs. It’s so stupid; she hadn’t even been looking. Eve was dead, and she had been fine with that.

“I wasn’t looking for you. I am working here. I just finished working, and there you were.”

“You killed someone here?”

“I was working.”

Eve just looks at her, something both sceptical and fed up about her expression, and she actually makes a sound like _tsk_, maybe a bit without her own permission.

“So this is a big coincidence? I don’t fucking believe you. This is so typical –”

“It is an accident. I didn’t know you would be in Warsaw. I didn’t know you would be anywhere. You are dead. But _Warsaw_. Why you would pick Warsaw –”

“Don’t. Just shut up. You don’t get to say that. You shot me.”

“You stabbed me.”

Eve sets her jaw, expression bullish, but eventually nods, a jerky movement that comes reluctant and clearly unwanted.

“I thought you’d gotten over that.”

\---

They go to some late-night café with Formica tabletops, and Eve doesn’t even think about going back to work. She ditches her apron when they pass a trash can. It isn’t worth resigning properly; she clearly won’t be staying in Warsaw, no matter what happens with Villanelle. She orders a glass of red wine, because everywhere serves wine in western Europe and it’s somehow cheaper than the coffee. The order comes out a little desperate, and she feels a flare of roiling anger when Villanelle snickers under her breath. Villanelle gets a piece of makowiec and takes a giant bite as soon as they sit down, leaning over the small plate to catch falling crumbs. She chews huge and obnoxious, and keeps eye contact with Eve all the way through it. Eve can’t even look away.

“You look like shit,” Villanelle says with a full mouth, and that hot anger in Eve’s gut comes back.

“I’ve been hiding from a psychopathic murderer.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes and takes another bite.

“I won’t murder you twice.” Some crumbs escape onto her lips, and she thumbs them away with a careless gesture. “That would be a waste of time.”

Eve takes a gulp of her wine, and settles back in her chair with her arms folded. The irritation is familiar, and so is the spike of sick pleasure. It’s horrible, feeling again. It’s too much. She flexes her hand, and it’s definitely not enough to release the tension that is building in her arms – her entire body, really, the tension that came with Villanelle’s lips against hers. She won’t call it a kiss, because kisses are supposed to be two-sided and wanted and less about manipulation. Kisses are supposed to be filled with desire. And she doesn’t. She won’t.

“What have you been doing?” Villanelle asks around her cake, still chewing, still eschewing table manners. “Have you been working at that restaurant? Have you been waiting for me to turn up? Have you been missing me?”

“I knew you’d come eventually.”

“But I didn’t come. I am here, and you are here. Something brought us together.”

“No.”

“It’s like fate.”

“No.”

“You need to stop saying that, or I will shoot you again.”

“I thought you wouldn’t murder me twice.”

“I didn’t say I’d kill you this time.”

Beneath the table, Villanelle’s booted feet knock against Eve’s kitchen clogs, and Eve is hurtled back to her first high school boyfriend and playing footsie under the table, innocent and filled with blushes and fluttering stomachs. The thrill she gets from Villanelle’s feet doesn’t hit her stomach; it hits her spine, a building chill, at once like true fear and the release of an orgasm.

It’s horrible, feeling again.

She knows she is staring, but refuses to talk again until Villanelle has finished eating. She looks the same as always, alert and unchanged. Like whatever happened between them hadn’t had an effect on her. Like Eve was just another kill.

“What have you been doing?” she asks as Villanelle swallows her final bite, and of course this is the one that Villanelle refuses to talk over.

“I have been travelling. Have you been to Barcelona? It is so beautiful. And Stockholm, in the springtime. I have been getting around.”

“You’ve been… working?”

“Busy, busy. So many jobs.”

There had been more people killed since she killed Eve. However many, maybe Villanelle didn’t even know. And Eve was just one of a number. Fate be damned, killing Eve didn’t seem to mean a thing to her.

“You said you’d be in mourning.” She doesn’t mean for it to sound accusatory, or petulant, and yet it somehow comes out both. She smothers it in another gulp of wine.

“What would I be mourning?”

Without cake to eat, Villanelle is scratching her fingernails over a groove in the tabletop. She doesn’t seem to realise she is doing it, and yet Eve now can’t look away from her picking at the surface, shaving tiny flecks of laminate away.

“The first time you were going to kill me,” Eve says to the table, “you said you would be in mourning. So when you actually did it, it didn’t matter? You didn’t feel anything?”

“I felt it, or I wouldn’t have done it.”

Eve reaches across the table, and it’s just to still Villanelle’s hand, but once she has laid hers over Villanelle’s knuckles, she can feel their warmth and the fragility of the thin skin there, and she can’t pull away. So they sit in the café, and Eve’s hand is holding Villanelle’s on top of the table, and Villanelle is staring at her.

\---

Villanelle’s hotel room is disgustingly chic as shit, some boutique outfit with tasteful art on the walls and an expansive window that catches a view of the old town. Without asking, Eve tears into the minibar and throws back the first tiny bottle she grabs, an echo of an action done before, but with a completely different emotion behind it. She ignores Villanelle behind her, just stands in front of the window and stares out at the lights cast on old and beautiful buildings. She can pretend she’s alone, until Villanelle is tugging at the hair tie that pulls her hair back, and gently – somehow gently, amazingly gently – arranging her hair around her shoulders. She draws back the curls like a veil and Eve feels her drawing closer, leaning down to press against the skin of Eve’s neck just above her collar. Villanelle inhales, deep and slow. With her this close, it feels like there’s something missing: a knife. A threat. The danger.

Eve doesn’t feel scared. She just feels… hot, deep in her gut, hot enough that she leans back and feels Villanelle’s body pressing against her. Hot enough that she tips her head to the side, letting her hair fall out of the way, letting Villanelle get at more of the skin of her. She reaches up, and her hand finds Villanelle’s head, and she cradles her as Villanelle’s touch turns to kisses. Because that’s what they are this time, kisses pressed against the thin skin of Eve’s neck, because Eve is inviting them and Villanelle is giving them generously.

There is no apology between them: Eve still tried to kill Villanelle, Villanelle still tried to kill Eve, but they want to touch each other, and they do. Eve turns under Villanelle’s mouth, and pushes at the shoulders of her jacket, rough and eager, pushing until Villanelle helps her and tugs herself free, jacket falling to the ground. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when she reaches behind herself and pulls a gun from god knows where, but it gets put on the hotel room desk and then Villanelle is working the hem of Eve’s shirt over her stomach, over her bra, encouraging Eve’s arms to raise and pulling the top over her head. Villanelle throws it to the side, and makes quick work of her own t-shirt.

Her scar is near the middle of her belly, almost a smile. Eve puts her fingers on it, and digs them in, but Villanelle doesn’t make any noise. She just reciprocates, finding Eve’s own shining mouth of a scar, and scratching at it with blunt nails. It makes that coil in Eve’s body pull tighter, so she grabs at Villanelle’s wrist and forces her nails in deeper, harsher. Villanelle takes the hint.

They become rough with each other, unpractised and keen, thumbing at buttons and tearing at hooks, and Villanelle’s whole body is in front of her, and Eve knows where she wants to grab. She doesn’t caress; she seizes, hips and waist and breast, and though her fingertips don’t leave imprints, she can imagine that they do. Villanelle jostles her and directs her, towards that vast hotel bed with starchy white sheets. The backs of her knees hit the mattress, and she lets herself fall, snatching for Villanelle’s wrist at the last moment and forcing her down as well.

And it’s like that, Villanelle hovering over her, between Eve’s legs and propped up by hands fisted in sheets, that Eve twists her fingers into Villanelle’s hair and pulls her down. She pulls her down, and lines her up, and their lips are pressed together. In a hotel room in Warsaw, wearing nothing but their skin, Eve kisses Villanelle. And she kisses back.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found [on tumblr](https://lesbeebooks.tumblr.com/)! Come and talk to me about KE and how Eve and Villanelle just need to stop trying to kill each other.
> 
> If you liked this, please comment!


End file.
